This is confusing. "Hacker" is a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data. "Software Engineer" is the right approach.
"Hacker Spirit" lol
There are more self-described hackers that do good and creative things, and not just related to computer security than the malicious types. Fun fact, the "maker" movement was a branded version of the "hackerspace" movement for people. Any time you hear about a Maker they're also a Hacker just kind of a subset of them.
Source: I'm senior staff of DEFCON, the largest hacker conference on the planet.
I was super into reverse engineering and loved the challenge. It seemed at some point "cracker" moved away from someone who can break software protections through reversing to someone who uses tooling to break into systems, without understanding how computers work. I still prefer "cracker" as someone who can reverse and break software protections.
Also, Thanks for helping out with Defcon! Been there a couple times and plan to go again. At the next live con i'm down to meet and talk about hacker lore!
I think the term cracker had the same media portrayal problem probably starting with the movie Sneakers (of the top of my head, no fact checking there) but it is a much more niche term in general and if you were to generally use it around people, probably even in computer adjacent jobs, they'd be more confused by what you're talking about then recognize it.
That being said yeah I'm 100% down with considering crackers being the DRM busters. I personally kind of consider demo scene wizards to be part of the "cracker" group even though it is completely unrelated. There just seems to be a heavy amount of overlap.
A cracker, to me, is someone who breaks software protection. A hacker can be good or bad, and that makes the word more fun.
Other comments have mentioned "cracker" in relation to invading systems. Before computers we had "safe-crackers".